Do you crave an obsessively realistic simulation of real-life driving, right down to the finest details? For example, would you be aroused if I told you that for a Ford RS200 Evo 2 4WD Division 2 Rallycross to spin while negotiating the Nürburgring's Carousel at 88 miles per hour, factoring in a crosswind, the weight of the driver's lunch and the drag coefficient of the windscreen wiper requires an imbalance of at least 1.1G between the vehicle's front and rear axes?

If you are, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait to get your ultra-realistic-driving-simulator kicks until either Gran Turismo 5 comes out or you buy yourself a real car. Complex and adjustable logarithms for axle-flex and tyre-wear, along with everything else that comes with the geek-racer genre, are not what the Need for Speed series has ever been about.

To be fair, this one is trying. It certainly looks real enough, especially from the much-exulted in-car view, in which you can move your head about to look left and right, and see the little driver on the screen change gear when you change gear. The screen goes blurry when you crash, too, which sounds annoying but is in fact incredibly satisfying. It sounds pretty real, too. The engine noises are spot on: I'm not sure whether they sampled each car separately or if they're faked, but either way they are satisfyingly loud, and while there may not be the frankly nerdy number of cars GT5 is promising, the several there are here have been lovingly modelled, and look great once I've painted them pink and covered them with tribal markings.

PR

You can also tinker with your car, fiddling with things like the tyre pressures and the toe-in angle of your front wheels. My nerd alarm rang, but it's very well judged: the predicted effect of your inexpert messing about is explained in layman's terms as you go, so you don't accidentally set your car up to shed all four wheels after half a mile. Expecting not to be able to tell a difference after having been baby-sat through the tuning process, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that I really could. The game lets you set your car up however you like it, and even twiddle it for different track conditions, without needing a postgraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Which, as anyone with a postgraduate degree in engineering will have guessed after reading the first paragraph, I do not have.

PR

It is lucky that all these attempts at reinventing NFS as a geek-racer has not translated that much to the actual driving experience. It is hard enough, once you whack up all the difficulty settings and put everything in "manual", to hold the interests of the serious geek-racer enthusiast for a little while, but it is forgiving and intuitive enough for the amateur to have fun without being alienated by obsessive, and oppressive, realness. The easy setting is quite ridiculously easy, and the points system is so generous that you can drive like you're holding the controller in boxing gloves and still rack up a hundred thousand stars, badges, style points or one of a silly number of other prizes to progress.

Shift is a jack-of-all trades. It doesn't go as far as the hyper-detailed and gruellingly realistic Gran Turismo games, but in making overtures to the geek-racer crowd it has allowed itself to mature slightly.